there are only ten days left on my calendar for this year. So I guess it’s time to review what has happened in those last 354 days of 2016.

Alpha Tests

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First off: We’ve run three major alpha tests this year: March Mayhem, Summer Alpha and Winter Alpha (which ends today). Each one of those has been larger than the ones before. We’ve gone from one small server somewhere in the back room of our hoster to our current setup that allows us to host thousands of concurrent players on machines in the EU, US, Hong Kong and Brazil.

Major Milestones

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But we’ve also reached a ton of other milestones this year. In April we could announce that through the FFF Production Funding and our new set of investors we have the budget to push the game to release. With the help of Teamspeak we were able to show the game at a massive booth at Gamescom where we were named Best Indie MMO by MMORPG.com. Which gave us the perfect opportunity to announce our new name: The Exiled.

Team Additions

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We’ve also seen a lot of great additions to our team over the year. Kelsey, Maya, Alex, Ramon and Martin started work on making the game look and sound so much better. The Talespinners started work on our background story and in October Ana kicked off our community team (whose amazing volunteers who have already started localizing our community)!

Game Changes

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And yes, together we’ve made a million of changes to the game which you can read in detail in our patch notes. Since listing all of them is far beyond possible, I’ll just list the major new features that we’ve added to the game in chronological order: Respect, valley defense, leaderboards, opportunities, flagging, shouts, clan management, building permissions, caravans, slow loot, looking for clan, call targets, new map editor and world map, drop chances, practice dummies, localized resources, recall, challenges and avatars, new XP system, newbie protection, group markers, tutorial, event calendar, power ranks, clan map markers, KO buffs, new combat abilities, rare mobs, new UI, new casting modes, new mobs, connected game worlds. Phew!

Numbers!

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Since everybody loves numbers, here are a few that I just pulled from our data repository: Over 130.000 people visited our web site this year. Our alpha tester mailing list grew from 10.000 to over 26.000 subscribers. Our alpha tests grew from 1.300 to over 6.000 active players. We’ve now committed over 12.000 game updates to our git repository. And we’ve released 45 alpha builds of the game to our testers.

Visuals

Here’s one for you visual learners. This is how the game looked in December 2015.

And here it is in December 2016. Quite a difference!

The same goes for our world map. Here is the old one:

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And this is the new world map:

Learnings

But despite all of that we’re not yet at the end of our road. Development of The Exiled continues and we’ve still got a lot to do! Newbies are having a hard time making progress solo. Our environment collision is too imprecise. The world map has too many annoying cul-de-sacs. Our process of sending our alpha keys and creating new accounts is too error-prone. Game feel is better but not yet good enough. There’s not enough early game content. And it’s still not easy enough to join a clan and keep that clan active.

Next Steps

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So yeah, lots to do for us still. 2017 will see us make good on something we promised you a long time ago: We’ll launch The Exiled on Steam Early Access and finally open the game up to a larger audience. This launch is not far off now. We’re already working on our preparations for it and will be back at that after a short Christmas break. Expect an announcement in January!

That’s it for me for this year. Thank you all for being with us. Enjoy the holidays and see you on the other side!